Herring Aid - the outcome

The hearing test produced the conclusion "Moderate hearing loss", with the subtext "What do you expect at your age, you old scrote?" As to solutions, there's a whole array of hearing aids that you can bung in or behind your ears, all of which, so weit ich weiss, do no more than amplify sound. They can't (as Mike&Ann pointed out) restore the lost frequencies. The effect of a hearing aid, then, is that you will hear everything within your frequency range, including things that were too quiet before - the rustling of your frock, the squeak of your boots, the farts of a passing bee and so on. Not exactly what I had in mind, so I am not going to go for the hearing aid solution after all. As a bonus, I will continue not to hear things I don't want to hear anyway, including the inanity of the phatic communion that passes for conversation these days. I will also continue not to hear what politicians are saying, and that can't be bad.